While researching my book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, one of the most important habits I gauged was the time of day that successful authors get their writing done. Not surprisingly, more writers I studied do their best work in the morning than at any other time.

The Bottom Line has been closed for eleven years, it closed January 2nd, 2004. I think about it all the time because I spent a great deal of my life there. One of the things I'm working on is an oral history viewed from the perspective of the performers who performed there.

Certainly the pedigree of Child 44 makes it seem promising. But the timing of the release -- April, a pre-summer graveyard -- and the fact that it wasn't screened for critics until shortly before opening both mitigate against it.